A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  Three months after the Goldenberg attack, a bomb exploded in front of a synagogue in the Antwerp diamond district. Once again, the attackers had completely misread their target. They imagined that a synagogue in the heart of the diamond district, the only nonmodern building in that little hook of streets behind the Pelikaanstraat, would be a direct hit on the Jewish establishment. In fact, the synagogue has little to do with the diamond district and serves the small Sephardic community. The bomb was placed there on the morning of Simchat Torah, a holiday which celebrates the conclusion of the annual cycle of Torah readings, when all of the Torahs are removed from the arc and carried around the synagogue to the accompaniment of singing and dancing. Children join in, carrying candles and little flags. The next morning, the celebration is repeated. But because in Antwerp Jews tend to be excessive about these events, the night before they had danced late into the night. Realizing that they would have only a few hours to sleep, they postponed the nine o'clock morning service to nine-thirty. The bomb went off at nine-fifteen, blowing out the metal and glass facades of the diamond district and killing three and wounding 106 people, all of them non-Jews. The Jews who worked in diamonds were all in synagogues outside of the diamond district.

  The bloodshed continued around Europe. Another man armed with an automatic pistol opened fire on the entrance to a Brussels synagogue during Rosh Hashanah services in September 1982. A few weeks later, as a crowd was leaving a Rome synagogue at the end of Sabbath morning services, assailants tossed hand grenades and opened fire with machine guns, killing a two-year-old boy and wounding thirty others. The Chief Rabbi of Rome charged that such attacks had been encouraged by the Italian government's welcoming Yasser Arafat on a recent visit.

  But the Palestinians were not the only problem. Even if an attack such as the one on Goldenberg's showed every sign of Palestinian work, the assailants clearly had their European admirers. Mysteriously, mimeographed flyers appeared around Amsterdam saying in Dutch, “In the heart of Paris freedom fighters have done a brave act.” The statement attributed the attack to French “Nationalists… nauseated by the fact that there are Jews in the Red French govern-in ent. Fiterman, a real French name isn't it?” Charles Fiterman, a Jewish Communist, was the minister of transportation in the new leftist French government that had come to power in 1981.

  Two of the bloodiest incidents of the period—the 1980 bombings of the Bologna train station, killing eighty-five, and the Munich Oktoberfest, killing 13—were both attributed to the extreme right. The Munich bombing was traced to a “martial sports group” led by Karl-Heinz Hoffmann. Shortly before the bombing, former Bavarian Prime Minister Franz-Josef Strauss had been quoted describing the group as people who were picked on for doing nothing more than spending their Sundays hiking. Many leaders of the German extreme right spent time in Hoffmann's sports camp. Hoffmann was released for lack of evidence in the Oktoberfest case, and after his sports group was banned, he became involved with the PLO and for a time centered his activities in Lebanon.

  In France alone, between 1977 and 1981, 290 violent acts were attributed to the extreme right. A 1981 West German government report claimed there were 200,000 right-wing extremists in Germany, but that “only” 3,000 were armed and ready to commit violence. In March 1981 the Sinus Institute, a West German pollster commissioned by the chancellor's office, found that 13 percent of the West German electorate—some five and a half million West Germans—held extreme right-wing political views. These views included hatred of foreign minorities and hatred of democracy and a reverence for what in German is called Volk, Germans as a racial entity. Almost half of these extremists said they approved of the use of violence.

  Throughout Western Europe, verbal and physical attacks on immigrants became increasingly common in the early 1980s. The Germans, as is the habit of their culture, invented a word for hostility to foreigners, Ausldnderfeindlichkeit. The neo-Nazi groups that had emerged in Germany in 1960 declined in the 1970s, but by 1980, they were larger and more active than ever before. As in France, the West German police seldom arrested right-wing extremists. On the other hand, in June 1983, when ten thousand people turned out to protest a planned rally of two hundred neo-Nazis in the Kreuzberg section of West Berlin, the police moved in with clubs and tear gas, and a pitched battle ensued in which 203 anti-Nazis were arrested. “Ausldnder ins KZ”—foreigners to the concentration camp—became a common graffiti slogan. “Foreigners out!” in various languages was becoming a common slogan throughout Western Europe. What was no longer common anywhere in Western Europe was an unguarded synagogue or Jewish institution. A Jew looking for a Sabbath service needed only look for the armed guards strolling in the street.

  FOR THE FIRST YEAR anniversary of the Goldenberg attack, French television did a special documentary interviewing Jo Goldenberg and other people in the Pletzl. Andre Journo eagerly took his turn to explain his theory of how defeated President Valery Giscard d'Estaing had been behind the attack. Henri Finkelsztajn, whose schoolboy stutter occasionally flared, was not eager to make such media appearances, but he was still angry. After the attack the people of the Pletzl—Arabs, Jews, Christians, even some gypsies— were scared and worried and had spent that afternoon together talking, but no one had chanted anti-Arab slogans. This had to be made clear to the public.

  With the camera running and lights so bright that his little bakery looked twice its size, Finkelsztajn found himself face to face with the old lines. He was asked if he was a Frenchmen. If so, why did he call himself a Jew? There was no stutter. Finkelsztajn, the high school drop-out, had a smile of wisdom and eyes that seemed to be winking as he explained, “I say I am a Jew because we are in France. When I am abroad, I say I am a Frenchman.”

  The interviewer, not content with this, pointed out that he was a Polish Jew. Henri, with the patience of a man who has spent a lifetime answering the same needless question, explained that he had never been to Poland, had had no contact with the country nor the slightest feelings for the place. Then he smiled his pleasant, amused smile—the same smile you get after buying one of his challahs.

  P A R T S I X

  EUROPE,

  NEW

  AGAIN

  Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht

  Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht

  (When I think of Germany in the night, Fm robbed of

  my sleep)

  —HEINRICH HEINE

  26

  In Poland

  IN SEPTEMBER 1989, HENRYK HALKOWSKI, THE DIRECTOR of the musty, nearly deserted Jewish social club in Cracow, was eager to show foreign visitors his town. For the first time since immediately after the war, Poland had a non-Communist prime minister. The Polish Communist dictatorship was over, and among the new freedoms was the possibility of showing your town to a Westerner without being watched by the secret police. Halkowski was an enthusiastic man in his late thirties with steel-rimmed glasses and a sardonic smile. On the day that Tadeusz Mazowiecki was installed as the first non-Communist prime minister, a New York University professor was in Cracow and Halkowski wanted to take him to the place where Tadeusz Kosciuszko had first vowed to fight for Polish independence almost two centuries earlier. Halkowski liked the idea that at this historic moment of the new Polish state, he should take someone to this historic spot. He also knew that Kosciuszko was the one Polish patriot whose name was known to New Yorkers—because of the bridge bearing his name on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway.

  Halkowski led the visitor to the large, empty medieval marketplace in the center of town that a few years later would be filled with tourist cafes. As he and his guest stopped at the very spot of the Kosciuszko vow, six young people with shaved heads and laced boots whom he had never seen before pulled him from behind and knocked him down. As they beat him with their fists, they shouted in German, “Jude, Jude, Jude” and then ran off. There was a police station nearby, but the militia that didn't allow youth to roam the streets attacking Jews, let alone curse them in German
, had already been disbanded.

  THE NEW POLISH STATE, which had for Halkowski so inauspi-ciously begun, was the fruit of two decades of political resistance. The crisis of the Communist state had become so extreme that the military had sought the help of the opposition but in the process gradually negotiated itself out of existence. The opposition had to be legalized, and then parliamentary elections had to be allowed. Power evaporated from Communist hands more rapidly than even Solidarity had been prepared for.

  It fell to the former Polityka chief, Marian Turski's longtime editor Mieczyslaw Rakowski, to ease the transition, first as prime minister, then as Jaruzelskfs replacement, becoming the last first secretary of a ruling Polish Communist party. In July, Rakowski appointed the last Communist-led government, but it lacked a following, and in August he had to replace the prime minister with a non-Communist.

  The dream had failed. The Communist state for which people like Marian Turski had been working all their lives had collapsed, bankrupt in every sense. Turski and his associates had been fighting this failure for thirty years. Ever since the Soviets invaded Hungary in 1956 and they saw that the Communism they had dreamed of was betrayed, they had been trying to get it back to what it was supposed to be. Turski said of the final collapse, “It was not a certain must. There could have been a lot of change.” The existing power was to Communist reformers like Turski a monster that used the label “Communism,” although they themselves were never able to mount a successful reform movement. “For myself and many of the people close to me,” Turski said, “the regime was not Communist. It was nothing but a nationalist, imperialist policy of Russia.”

  Barbara Gora, another longtime Communist, did not mourn the regime's passing, either. She had never married and had always been absorbed in her work. She had found a position compiling a weekly newsletter on foreign agriculture. The three-page publication was intended to be a serious journal for professionals who wanted to keep up with interesting ideas around the world. She tried to make it her contribution to improving Polish agronomy. But it was difficult to fit all the information into only three pages, and she worked under a man who desperately wanted to embellish his standing in the party by having his own articles published. His studies were usually arcane and irrelevant and sometimes ridiculous. She particularly remembered his pointless study of Swedish bears. When they were that silly, she would simply take the article home with her and never mention it. But she was often obliged to run his pieces. Dissatisfied, she left when the first opportunity to retire came up in 1987. “We all waited for the changes. We were so disappointed with our lives. This was not socialism. It was state capitalism. There was a privileged class, the owners of Poland.”

  But the new Polish state would also have its disappointments. Konstanty Gebert understood that in spite of its coalition of Jews, Catholics, unionists, and intellectuals, Solidarity had always had an anti-Semitic element, especially within the Warsaw chapter of the trade union. During the 1990 presidential campaign, a poll indicated that 30 percent of Poles believed “Jews have too much influence in Poland.” Among those who said they intended to vote for Walesa, 50 percent agreed with that statement.

  In the local elections that year several small parties expressed anti-Semitism. A small conservative Catholic party with the backing of Polish Primate Jozef Cardinal Glemp produced a poster that showed a happy worker tossing out a barrel-load of people bearing the sinister rapacious faces that have become the standard anti-Semitic stereotype for Jews. The caption said, “Enough of socialism, comrades.”

  In the 1990 presidential race, Mazowiecki, having been the first post-Communist leader, appeared to be mounting a major challenge to Walesa's candidacy. Although Mazowiecki was a devout Catholic, his campaign was dogged by persistent rumors that he was secretly a Jew. No public figure ever uttered this, but it appears to have been widely believed. Konstanty Gebert, who by that time had become a well-known journalist, would question people on why they believed this. One person explained to him, “He is sad, and he prays too much,” while another told him, “Well, he did get to be prime minister, didn't he?”

  While Walesa had always been outspoken in condemning anti-Semitism, he did nothing to deflate the anti-Semitic tone of the campaign, no doubt since it had turned against his principal opponent. He started playing with Polish anti-Semitism, vaguely alluding to hidden Jewish activities and asserting that he was “a hundred percent Pole” and that he had documents going back “for generations untold” proving his Polishness.

  In a speech to a Solidarity group Walesa referred to rumors that “a new clique is at the trough again.” He went on to say that he had heard they were Jews. A group angrily walked out of that meeting and established its own party, the Civic Movement for Democratic Action. Walesa complained that he could not attack the new movement without being accused of anti-Semitism. When Gebert asked him at a press conference if he considered the Movement to be “a Jewish party,” he said no but then added, “Why do they conceal their origins?” As he went on the campaign trail, he was regularly confronted with questions about when he would throw the Jews out of government. Some would shout, “Gas the Jews.”

  Walesa did not confront these comments at his rallies and when he later talked about such incidents, latent Polish anti-Semitism lept slipping into his rhetoric. In the meantime anti-Semitic graffiti, which had appeared occasionally even in Communist times, was becoming increasingly common, especially “Gas the Jews” written in Polish and “juden Raus” Jews Out, written in German. Anti-Semitic literature was once again being sold openly on the streets. In Kielce the performance of a Jewish folk group was interrupted by firecrackers and the shouting of anti-Semitic epithets. A month before the election, a group of reportedly more than a dozen youths stormed the Jewish Historical Institute in central Warsaw, smashing windows but failing to break down the door. They tried again one week later. Although the Institute is located near police headquarters, the siege continued for more than an hour without the police ever intervening.

  Walesa won the presidency by a landslide. Mazowiecki did not even come in second, trailing behind an unknown return emigre from Canada who promised to improve the life of Poles within one month. Gebert described Walesa as “a consummate opportunist. He used anti-Semitism because it was expedient.” The longer Walesa stayed in office, the more Poles would see this electrician who spoke rough and uneducated Polish as a self-serving egotist focused on power politics with few programs. In 1993 even the Solidarity trade union broke with him. The old opposition had been certain to break up once it came to power, but one of the first rifts in the victorious anti-Communist coalition was when Jewish intellectuals split with Watesa over the 1990 campaign. Shortly before the election, Adam Michnik, who first came to prominence in the 1968 student protests, wrote to Waresa in his paper, Gazeta Wyborcza, “I have never accused you of anti-Semitism, but I do want to say that what you had said—that people of Jewish origin should reveal themselves—and I am a Pole of Jewish origin—was for me as if I had been spat in the face. I will not forgive you this.”

  At the same time, the short-lived amity between Jews and the Catholic Church ended over the existence of a Carmelite Convent at Auschwitz. It was foreign Jews and not those in Poland who strongly objected to this Catholic shrine, which had stood just outside Auschwitz since the 1970s. In 1987 the Catholic Church came to an agreement with Western European Jewish leaders to close the convent by February 1989. But no steps were taken to close it down, and as the deadline approached, Cardinal Glemp began vaguely denouncing the accord. Avi Weiss, a Riverdale, New York, rabbi, went to Poland with his group to protest. Barred from the convent, they climbed over the walls to stage a sit-in. Workmen attacked them with urine, water, and paint and had started to beat them when the Polish police reluctantly intervened. Glemp delivered a homily in traditional anti-Semitic language, accusing the Jews of thinking themselves “a nation above all others” and asking them not to use their “power in the mass medi
a.”

  The upsurge in anti-Semitic attacks around Poland at the time of this homily was probably not coincidental. Glemp had never been popular because he had been seen as too soft on the old Communist regime (even in his anti-Semitism, he would slip into official rhetoric, such as referring to Jews as Trotskyites). But after this homily he suddenly gained a following. The international controversy over the convent went on for several more years, and in the end the Jews were the great losers. Instead of the convent the Catholics built a far larger visitor complex two hundred yards outside the camp. As the relationship between the Church and the Jews regained its more traditional tensions, the era of Solidarity ended.

  As Walesa was losing his mass following, a sign of the confused state of post-Communist Polish anti-Semitism was a graffiti message on a Cracow wall which said “Send Walesa to Madagascar.”

  NINEL KAMERAZ had simply wanted to overthrow Communism. She was not disappointed nor did she continue her political activities. Though her building was no longer Jewish, her apartment was unmistakably the home of a Jew, even if the mezuzah was on the inside rather than outside of the doorway. It was a warm dark place in earthen colors, with antique books and a sense of organized chaos. She had taken up painting, and the walls were covered with her slightly macabre tempera paintings. She had an old Victrola with a horn through which she played prewar recordings of Yiddish songs. The one small room—almost filled by a large wooden table with an electric samovar whose on-off switch was built into the table—was her conversation room. She would flip on the hot water for tea and reflect on the changes in her adopted country. “The Poles see themselves altogether differently from what they are. They see themselves as having always struggled for the freedom of all nations, that they waited for centuries, that all around them are animals—the Germans, the Czechs, the Russian, the Lithuanians—who are always stupid or evil or mean, all kinds of things, and about the Jews we know already. But they, the Poles, are pure and wonderful and good. When this was a closed state under Communism, they couldn't go anywhere. They looked in on themselves, they had to analyze themselves. And when the borders opened and they began to travel again, it turned out that people didn't say such nice things about Poles after all. They said they were thieves, that they didn't know how to work. And the Poles said, What? How can that be? We fought for liberty and freedom of all nations. How can you say such terrible things about us?’ It's good that these lessons were learned. They were hard lessons, but they were necessary. And now they are finding out that they are normal people. They are good. They are bad. All kinds.”